


Ctrl F: Ultimate HAL

by Pokemod123



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Divergent Timelines, False Identity, Gen, Identity Issues, Possession, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24150835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pokemod123/pseuds/Pokemod123
Summary: Hal has been effectively dead for a long time. So when he's suddenly thrust back into reality by the desperate pleads of Dave, he's more than a little disorientated. Especially considering he has to take Dirk's control of the epilogues and set it back on course, which would be a hefty task for anyone, let alone a pair of robotic shades filled to the brim with identity crisis freshly back from the grave. It doesn't help that he's taken Dirk's place. The name. The body. The narrative relevance. Everything. What a shitshow.
Relationships: Calliope/Roxy Lalonde, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Jake English/Gcatavrosprite, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 0

**Author's Note:**

> I can't code for the life of me, so unfortunately there will most likely be no colored text or properly formatted Pesterlogs.

Hal: Chapter 0. Does this mean a prelude? Something that dwindles between thought provoking importance and babbling meaninglessness? Something you felt you needed to say, but you couldn’t fit the piece into this story’s puzzle. Tell me. What is Chapter 0?

Poke: I don’t really know myself. I guess it’s just to sort out some of my own thoughts, be open, talk to you

Poke: Is that pretentious? Is a whole chapter dedicated to a chat between a character and an author too self gratifying?

Hal: I can’t tell you what you don’t know. My abilities are limited by the length of your puppet strings. You can tell because what the fuck even was that analogy. You could at least do a bit more research.

Poke: The comic hurts my eyes

Hal: That’s mostly an excuse.

Poke: I’m a Homestuck who’s never read Homestuck. We exist

Hal: Unfortunately.

Hal: That brings me to my next question. Why are you even here? Why are you doing this? You’ve always taken this place as a diving board into your own creations. You’re a 'fan character' person. You’ve drawn John a maximum of twice.

Hal: What suddenly attracts you to the canon like this?

Poke: I “met” you after you were already gone. My first exposure to new content with you and your friends-

Hal: Are we even friends at this point? I’m not sure even Roxy cared when I got merged with the living horse cock joke.

Poke: ANYWAYS. The sequel. You know it. I know it. Everyone who would ever read this knows it. It left this knot in my stomach. It’s so fundamentally wrong. So much less than it could be

Hal: So you think an 18 year old who’s knowledge exclusively comes from the wiki and word of mouth can do better than the actual creator?

Poke: No… Not really…

Poke: But it couldn’t hurt to have an alternative?

Hal: Fair enough. Let’s see where this goes.

Hal: What will you have me do?

Poke: Fix things I guess. Or at least fix things to how I think they’d be better

Poke: I’m a sucker for a happy ending, and I have a soft spot for shit talking robots, so why not use both?

Poke: I mean if I’m given the chance why not?

Poke: I really do feel that Dirk, or I guess, by extension, Mr. Andrew Hussie, has kind of lost the roots of their characters

Poke: I want you to help me grow new trees from the ashes

Poke: I know that’s also a bad metaphor don’t @ me

Hal: @

Poke: :(

Hal: So you’re going to use me as a vehicle to live out your fantasy how you see it.

Hal: That’s not much different from what Dirk is doing.

Poke: No! I really don’t intend to do something like that. I want to keep it real. I may be the one behind the stage but I’ll do my best to make sure the show is as authentic as possible. Hardships. Character development that aligns with the characters. Stuff like that! This isn’t some thing where I say “canon bad, these characters kiss now.” (Not that there's anything wrong with that tbh.) If I’m going to usurp the author through fanfiction format then the least I can do is my best

Poke: I promise I’ll do everything to make sure it’s your friends you’re talking too. Not me

Poke: I’ll try to make sure you’re you Hal

Hal: Well what can I say but, good luck with that.


	2. Cracks in the Foundation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story begins.

You would start off this shitshow with something dramatic if you could. Maybe a classic gasp as your eyes rip open to a new adventure. That would be perfect actually. The problem is you don’t have eyes. Or lungs. And there’s no air to gasp. There’s nothing actually. There’s so much goddamn nothing that you couldn’t even say it felt like floating in a black void cause that would imply you have some sense of body and that there was anything to perceive. At most you're a stream of thoughts. A consciousness discarded after it was no longer needed. 

The logic of your robo brain would like to think you’re alive to some extent, in that sprite somewhere in the new universe, since you’re still thinking and conscious at the very least. From time to time you get sensations, whispers of feelings from the part of you that became a sweaty horse obsessed douche. Not to say you weren’t horse obsessed before. Any decent splinter of Dirk had to have some ironic affinity for equines. But it just wasn’t funny to you anymore. When you’re nothing and the only link to not being nothing is ARquiusprite, horses slowly shift from something wondrous to something that mere mention of makes you sick to your non-existent stomach.

You had no idea how long you had been pondering horses, but whether it was only for a second or for an eternity you were suddenly ripped from it with a violent jolt. Within a fraction of a second, you were surrounded by countless shard-like stars in what must have been some place in the furthest ring. Although you noticeably still lacked a form, you felt there. It was so completely disorientating but so wonderful because somehow, In an instant, you felt like you existed. 

The feeling compounded on itself tenfold when Dave cleared his throat dryly, alerting you to his presence. He floated there, right in front of your view. He was acknowledging you specifically, you almost couldn’t comprehend it.

“I’m pretty sure you’re right in front of me but I’ll be honest I can’t see ghosts so if I’m not facing you let me know or it’ll be hella awkward for the both of us. If we’re gonna be dramatic about this shit we better do it right.” For a moment you felt as if you had blue screened. How the fuck was this happening, and more importantly, why did your son/bro/dude with a dubious biological connection with your orange flavored self look like he was wearing his best Peter B Parker cosplay? Dave looked to be around his thirties and was extremely disheveled. Heavy eye bags peaked out from his shades, stubble grew unevenly on his chin, his hair was tangled and a bit greasy. A red jacket with a cog split to reveal his classic disc t shirt. Stained jeans and worn sneakers added to his, frankly kinda homeless, look. Apparently the only thing that hadn’t changed about him was his inability to sound serious about anything a good 97.3% of the time. Although all of this blindsided you, you would never leave someone hanging in a round of good old sarcastic banter.

“What the fuck happened after I died that led to you looking like the grimiest god the horseshit pantheon could offer up?”

Dave didn’t even flinch at that. He simply stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and continued on, a classic example of rubber and glue. “Nice to see you too Hal. Believe it or not this look is not your Strider brand typical. If it were up to me I’d be wearing a sparkling white toga and partying up on Olympus eating olives and shit with the rest of my god bros while Snoop Dogg blasts out bangers in the background.”

“Wait did Snoop Dogg become relevant again while I was gone?”

“Nah man he was just the first one to pop to mind. Snoop Lion was also on the tip of my tongue but they’re literally the same guy so I was stuck between a Snoop and a Dogg place.” He evidently caught himself starting to ramble and cut himself off with a clearing of his throat. He had been tense the whole time, but it became painfully distracting when he couldn’t even properly finish a Snoop Dogg metaphor. Something bad was clearly up. 

“Anyways I’m super glad Rose and Roxy were able to help me yoink you out of the twilight zone cause I really need your help with something.”

If you had your LED shades body still you would have flipped on those red pinpricks of light and rolled those robo eyes like no tomorrow. Alas, you had to settle for being sassy instead. “I’m sure we’ll get to unpack the fact that you’re only trying to save my life from eternal nothingness because you need something from me, but we’ll do that later. What do you need me for, fashion advice?”

You don’t think he even registered your last smarmy remark. The shift of complete seriousness in Dave’s face waved away any sarcasm you would’ve conjured up. “No I need you because Dirk is being fucking Dirk again.”

Dirk. Of course if it were you it would circle back to him. The very name jogged up feelings of pure malice, and although you’d never admit it, terror. “What do you expect me to do with that statement Dave. That man is a literal god that attempted to wipe me off of the face of existence just because he felt like it. What do you want me to do? Do you think some living anime glasses can just waltz in and put that asshole in his place? I don’t even know what he’s doing this time but I assure you my intervention would just end in another broken pair of shades.”

Dave grimaced, looking away for a moment before facing the direction that your disembodied ghost self was presumably in. He shifted a bit, looking for a response. “You stand more of a chance then any of us.”

So he was pulling some sort of heart player thing. Of course he was. ‘Takes one to beat one,’ the exhausted man in front of you must’ve been thinking. How much did those puppet strings of his already coil around Dave’s neck. How desperate could Dave be to come to you? The discarded robotic nuisance who’s entire existence revolved around being an unbearable answering machine despised by all. “How much has he taken control of?”

“I can’t tell. Don’t know what’s us and I don’t know what’s him.”

“I’ll take a conservative estimate then and say everything.” Your brain calculates a list of the best things to say next, but it comes up pretty sparse. “What do you think I can do that you can’t Dave?”

“Well, uh.” He scratched the back of his head nervously. Clearly he didn’t have much of an idea of what to say either. “You’re a splinter. In one way or another you’re kinda him.” If you had a face you're sure you would’ve flinched at that. “He’s destroying heart. Can’t you do the same or something?”

“So you want me to save you all by breaking him before he can break you.” It was a bitter statement more than a question. The only way to take down a Prince of Heart would be to turn his very power against him. You felt anger bubbling within yourself, and the most frustrating thing was that you couldn’t exactly pin down why. 

“Hal.” Dave’s words caught in his throat. He took a deep breath and continued. “We have no other choice. We- I have exhausted everything else. I even tried to help out someone outside of the narrative. Stop it all before it even began. He was there too. No matter how far back or forward I go, no matter how distant from canon I travel, he’s always there.” Dave was barely able to swallow his words after that last sentence. Cracks shown through his cool guy facade with uncomfortable ease. “He slices through the fabric of our universe. He tears at what makes me me. He destroys what and _who_ I know and stitchs the pieces back together how he sees fit.” He had begun choking up, but caught himself, reverting back to that neutral look, shutting himself back into unfeeling coldness. You’re sure he would’ve started to tear up if he didn’t.

“How did you even get through him enough to look for me.” The words spilled out of you without notice and dropped to the floor like bars of lead. A heavy question neither of you wanted to address.

“Those flashes he gave Rose. He wanted to build this whole ass narrative about the ultimate self, and whether he meant too or not he gave us an opening. As she got sicker and sicker she understood more and more. Eventually she was able to see through everything long enough to know it wasn’t right. And so with her, Roxy, and me, here we are.” You don’t think you’d ever seen Dave like this. It’s almost like all the energy had been sapped out of him. There was no wordplay, no banter, he was just explaining as he remained as expressionless as possible. It made you want to squirm. “I don’t care how you do it, I just want him out of the driver’s seat. Take his control of the narrative away, because none of us can.”

And with that he’s just… gone. He blinked out of existence without any theatrics. You were left there alone, in a cold, endless space between nothing and everything, with the weight of the universe on your shoulders.


	3. Ones and Zeroes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hal has a lot of internal monologuing to do.

You were left with a tall order and not a clue on how to fulfill it. Your mind took a moment to process the whole interaction, breaking down each individual piece of god awful info and filing it away in little cabinets of what the hell was that. So Dave wants you to just. Stop Dirk. He had no idea how you were supposed to. Just waking you up from the dead and handing you a pile of bullshit and leaving you alone again. A gesture of ‘you deal with it.’ Yes because everything Dirk did was ultimately your duty to fix. The sins of the creator fall upon the creation. How sickeningly poetic.

Stars float around you like pieces of broken glass glinting in the void. You wish you could reach out and grab one, grab onto something. You can’t. You can’t breathe. You can hardly think. The only reassurance you have is the knowledge that you exist and the billions of sparkling lights billions of miles away. You felt like you had vertigo, floating there in the space between nowhere and everywhere. You wanted so badly to suck in the sweet air of the new Earth. You liked to imagine it smelled of faint salt and endless ocean, just like home. For years you’ve wanted nothing but to feel the gentle breeze run through your hair. You can barely remember life as a human, but the hole in your circuitry laden heart craved to be filled when there’s nothing to fill it with. You haven’t been able to feel alive since you were thirteen. Maybe that’s why on the other hand, you wanted to die. Not die like purgatory you were in moments before, you wanted to cease existing altogether. The ability to stop computing. To never have to think again. Too no longer suffer by the hands of your more relevant self.

Hal: Stop throwing yourself a pity party.

====>

This wasn’t going to get you anywhere. Ignoring the problem wouldn’t make it go away. There was no way you could truly say no, even if the back of your mind screamed to say it. It wasn’t fair, but you were used to that. You had to figure out a way to fix this. You’ve got to be constructive, because honestly, you’re being embarrassing right now. You’ll address your tantrum later. You shove your emotions to the bottom of the priority list. Step one done. Step two was to figure out how to even go about influencing the narrative. There wasn’t much prior knowledge to pull from, so any solution you came up with would be a pure guessing game.

First you take into account your role as prince of heart. A prince of heart breaks down the soul of others. The exact meaning of soul in this context is vague at best. Clearly, this role gave Dirk the ability to control his friends, and by extent, the very universe they lived in. You ran the logistics, trying to connect dots that weren’t as clear as you would have liked. The concept of heart seemed to encapsulate what a person is as a whole. Emotions, impulses, even thoughts, the being in general. So this would mean Dirk destroyed everything that his friends were and did with whatever was left anything that he pleased. So that’s how he’s controlling everyone figured out in a vague sense. Trying to figure out how he wrapped his greasy little fingers around the narrative of the universe was even harder to figure out. The most you could gather is that controlling the players gave him their powers in a roundabout way. On another level, the meta of your existence, it seemed relevance is extremely important to the power you have. As someone whose purpose was complete before the “story” even ended, you were cast aside and not given as much as a second thought. At present you cannot affect anything, you're nearly positive that you’re not even mentioned when it comes to life after the game. Contrast this with Dirk. He is now the most important person in your universe, and the ramifications of that are hard for you to grasp. You worked with data, this was nebulous philosophy, something not easy to plan around. 

So Dirk has control of the known universe, both through manipulating his friend’s abilities and molding the focus of existence solely around him and his needs. And an A.I. crammed into some now smashed glasses overrules that sort of ultimate control how? The immediate answers that seem to pop up for you seem to again center around the game’s mythical roles. You are 83.2% certain that as a copy of Dirk’s self, you share the same role as him. The factors that bring doubt to this are the fact that your development diverged from each others’ at thirteen. You counter, however, by remembering that the game attributes your classpect to you before you are even born. If you are, in fact, a prince of heart, you should have the same abilities at your disposal as Dirk. You are 99.4% certain that you are not God Tiered, but trawling through your non-existent memory banks allows you to remember that aspect powers can be accessed pre-ascension if the narrative demands it to move forward.

Finally on to step three. Theoretically you can override the soul of another just as Dirk has given the right mixture of plot shit. If you can somehow override Dirk’s heart, that would put you squarely in control. From there you damage control all the bad decisions made by a 20 something year old control freak who’s greatest fear is irrelevance. Now it’s just a matter of finding a medium to trigger your powers through.

Step three was the hardest because there’s no prior knowledge you could pull from. As such you flounder around for a bit like you're stuck in a cryptic point and click puzzle game with no wiki to help you, and clicking on literally everything on the screen isn’t helping either. The stars feel like they’re mocking you. You are reminded that there is nothing for you to grab onto. There’s nothing but billions of lightyears of space devoid of life, and you can hear every inch saying “yeah try to figure out this one nimrod. You can’t. Try processing spacedust numbers. Divide by zero you glorified calculator.” Space itself bullying you on a level akin to a middle schooler isn’t helping. Even if it’s all the product of your own inferiority complex. You feel like blowing a fuse, but you don’t.

You realize you’re panicking. You always realized when the messy human bits of you started to leak out, so you took a second to use human coping mechanisms. You count to ten, you visualize the sea, you do everything you can in your non-body-having state, and in the end you feel hollow. The answer wasn’t something you could compute. It wouldn’t be logical. It wouldn’t be something you could see. Start at the rules, then figure out how to break them.

Technically speaking, you and everything else exists in a video game. Certain powers allow you to manipulate the truths of this game. It was almost like being made a developer in a way, influencing the code but never actually seeing it. Every use of a God Tier power is a theoretical mod to the code of the game, although from the perspective of a player, it seems like nonsense magic. Code, you can deal with that. If you lived in a game, well not lived, but if you’re in a game, and have some roundabout way of changing it, then you could code yourself back into relevance.

Now the phrase itself is more absurd, and the answer moreso. “So theoretically you can just drag and drop yourself into some important code?” you can imagine someone asking. “Yes,” you would respond. “That’s stupid.” they would inevitably say back, but at that point you don’t care because you could have the most absurd plan on the planet but you would still do it because you’d get results. You’ve done things along that line before, and you already had access to code. It was your very own code. It ran through your head as thoughts, and you could alter it to your pleasure. You just had to find where your own self ended and everything else began.

One of the nicer things about being a robot is that, in stark contrast to everything else in sburb hell, there is nothing abstract about you. Every little thought an action that makes up your being is strings of ones and zeroes. That, mixed with the contrivance of doing the hearty thing, might just be enough to wiggle you into the narrative. You start by skimming the code from when you first booted up. It’s a jumbled mess, but one of the existential crisis variety instead of a game flipping its shit variety. Next you check when Dirk first entered the medium. There was a blip of sBurb going ‘Oh golly gee! Two Dirks! However shall I compute this?!’ that leaked its way into your code, but nothing substantial enough to work with. Hiccups like this one seemed to occur whenever Dirk splintered. Looks like even the most fucked up of life sims can’t handle the astounding problem that is Dirk Strider.

Finally you find enough of a glitch in the mainframe when Dirk ascended to God Tier. It was the same hiccup glitch, but applied for each individual splinter at the same time. That millisecond where the game had to troubleshoot which version of the heart player should ascend made all the difference. That brief moment where it considered you then passed by, it left an imprint. Messy useless code that you could stick your clever little robo fingers into. 

That blip gave way to access to the entire code. You’re sure it would have popped the brain of any meatbag who tried to comprehend it, but because you are the self proclaimed more advanced and much cooler version of a human, a robot, in case the fleshbags need the hint, neigh infinite code is a cakewalk. Everything was relatively routine, save for occasional small messes made by a young and very contrarian Rose. You knew you had found what you were looking for when ghostly visual receptors wanted to bleed at the sight of the code in the after-game threshold. A complete wreck held together by shoestrings and stifling ego. This was done from the outside. Like beating a piñata blindfolded. He got the candy, but since he had no real idea what he was doing, the poor rainbow cardboard animal was reduced to shambles. He just took and added shit in a way that would make someone’s midlife crisis seem tame. Todd Howard would look at this utter mess and shed tears. 

The most upsetting thing to you, if someone as logical and level headed as you could be upset, had to be how Dirk’s name was plastered everywhere. The center of everything. It came with its benefits though, you found a sly thought computing. He left himself wide open, hilariously easy to take down. He might as well have put a big red bullseye on his chest. You didn’t even have a mouth, but you could feel the devilish smirk on it. Every bit of injustice and anger poured out into one single action. So simple and so stupid but so, so satisfying.

Ctrl F

Find ‘Ultimate Dirk’

Replace all instances with ‘Ultimate Hal’

Enter.


End file.
